Charles Babbage and broadcasting the sea

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2023

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The noisy Victorian world annoyed the mathematician, philosopher and inventor Charles Babbage, who came up with the idea of a programmable computer. He wrote letters complaining about it and a pamphlet which explored ideas about whether the sea could record its own sound, had a memory and could broadcast sound. New Generation Thinker Joan Passey, from the University of Bristol, sets these ideas alongside the work done by engineers cabling the sea-bed to allow communication via telegraph and Rudyard Kipling's images of these "sea monsters."

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in partnership with BBC Radio 3. Ten early career academics are chosen each year to share their research on radio. You can find a collection of discussions, features and essays on the Free Thinking programme page. Joan Passey can be heard in Free Thinking episodes discussing Cornwall and Coastal Gothic, Oceans and the Sea at the Hay Festival 2022, Vampires and the Penny Dreadful.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Can I just say?
0:01.5	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast.
0:04.0	It's such a wonderful listen.
0:05.6	So nice.
0:06.5	There are loads more like it on BBC sounds.
0:08.8	Different paces, different heights.
0:10.6	The roof is buckling.
0:11.9	Where you can also listen to live sports commentary.
0:14.2	It's right foot goes for goal.
0:16.7	And then enjoy even more podcasts full of analysis and reaction to the big stories.
0:21.7	The stat that is astonishing is they ended with the lowest amount of possession.
0:25.2	And she's had to live with that.
0:26.8	So if you love sport, a passion, it's almost like a religion.
0:29.7	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:31.7	Sort of expecting that every week now.
0:34.6	Hello, I'm Joan Passy, a new generation thinker working with Radio 3 and the Arts and
0:40.7	Humanities Research Council to share some of my academic work.
0:44.8	For this episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast, I'll be talking about one great Victorian
0:50.3	thinker trying to find meaning in the sound of the sea.
0:55.6	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:59.5	Charles Babbage. You might know him as the father of modern computing, but his life was a lot
1:06.2	busier and noisier than that. Without Babbage, we wouldn't have computing, as we know it.
	...

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